"Survivors' poetry", the title of the series in which Richard McKane's new anthology, Ten Russian Poets: Surviving the Twentieth Century, appears, is a curious and in some ways tautologous concept. Great poetry always speaks of searing events embraced or barely evaded. Yet at the same time, the admirable human qualities displayed by those who survive tragedy don't always make poems on their own. Prisoners in the Russian gulag (Solzhenitsyn is a case in point) often composed their testimony in verse for instrumental reasons - to make it easier to remember. Poetic talent or even technical competence were concerns of little, if any, importance.

Still, 20th-century Russian literature - in compensation for the country's infamous heritage of war, famine, and political repression - has more than its share of outstanding poetry recording violence, terror and imprisonment transcended. One could take the harsh ballads of degradation, love and generational guilt that Anna Barkova wrote during and after more than 20 years of imprisonment between 1934 and 1965, or Mandelstam's vehement refusal to let his mouth be stopped by state repression.

Mandelstam, though not Barkova, appears in the McKane anthology, a sampler of work by poets ranging in age from Mikhail Kuzmin (born 1872) to Katia Karpovich (born 1960, and the token woman in the group). A curiosity is the inclusion of 15 pieces by the "Anonymous poet from the Arsenal Mental Prison Hospital"; otherwise, the contributors are all professional writers, but have little else in common. McKane argues that "in every anthology there should be a poet who doesn't quite fit", but in fact the survivors here are so diverse that it's difficult to grasp what the standard size might be.

Much of the work is not, even according to the loosest interpretation, "survivors' poetry". Kuzmin, for example, whose post-revolutionary poetry includes the bleak yet heart-rending "The Trout Breaks the Ice", is here represented by "Alexandrian" work from his days as a St Petersburg exquisite in the 1910s. And the selection of poems by Mandelstam shows the poet enduring life in "web-footed Moscow", rather than suffocating in the black mud of his Voronezh exile.

In fact, the kinds of trial endured here are ones that could perfectly well have been demanded by other eras of Russian history or by life in other European countries - unhappy love, boredom, urban angst. The selection of work by Arseny Tarkovsky (1907-89) - meditations on the wretchedness of existence ("An eagle rests in the desolate steppe / On the blackened chimney of a burnt-out house / So this is the pain I've known since a child...") alongside tributes to Paul Klee and Aeschylus - is typical. Fortunately, though, Tarkovsky's work is not always as cavernous as this, or as the allegorical poems that his film-director son had the hero recite in Stalker. The ornithology in "Blue Tits" is closely observed and playful, as the creatures "came flying / Stupendously noisy / Sounding like silver spoons in a Greek café".

Indeed, the strength of McKane's anthology is that it introduces English-speaking readers to a number of major poets who aren't as well known outside Russia as they should be, such as Tarkovsky, Boris Poplavsky (1903-35), and Viktor Krivulin (1944-2001), and that the selection of their work isn't in fact driven by an exclusive emphasis on suffering. So we see Krivulin delighting in the power of art to live on in uncomfortable places - a reproduction of Aleksei Savrasov's sombre early spring landscape The Rooks Have Returned in a communal kitchen, or a frightful panneau in the headquarters of a collective farm, "nursing home of the national muse". And Leonid Aronzon (1939-70) is heard playfully telling a lover: "I seem to think that we've met somewhere / I know your nipple so well and your underwear".

Marina Tsvetaeva is not one of McKane's metric dozen of Russian poets, perhaps because she is - in her greatest collection After Russia - the archetypal non-survivor of 20th-century Russian literary history, drawn to self-annihilation on the one hand and fierce complaint on the other. That said, Milestones (1916), standing on the road between the witty, self-aware ingenue verse of Tsvetaeva's collections and the severe folklorism of Craft (1923) shows off a different side of this hyperactively varied and prolific poet. Some "milestones" have the names of former lovers on them (Mandelstam, and also the poet Sofiya Parnok, 1885-1933), the subject of a particularly tender and lyrical farewell). Others are dedicted to heroes of Tsvetaeva's youth, the poets Anna Akhmatova and Aleksandr Blok.

Particularly in the last case, tribute becomes self-assertion, with Tsvetaeva honouring Blok's ethereal appearance ("tender phantom"), but also giving him a purely Tsvetaevan erotic corporeality ("Your name - a sliver of ice on the tongue"). And the collection sees the first appearance of some central themes in Tsvetaeva's later verse - the black magic of desire, say - as well as a first boiling-up of the folkloric sources that were to slake her for the next two and a half decades. Some poems have the lyric heroine taunting her lover like a village shrew: "Ah - just look at your head thrown back / Hiding - eh - half-closed eyes." In others, she adopts a rustic wise-woman mode: "I gave birth to a daughter / Eyes blue as the water / A voice that is dovelike / And hair like the - sunlight. / For the woe of young lasses / For the woe of young lads."

This rustic voice is particularly hard to capture in English, and to his credit, Robin Kemball does catch echoes of it now and again, as in the passage just quoted. He is less successful with the more "literary" poems, having a weakness for historical-pageant diction ("Hark!", "selfsame", "blest / And beauteous girdle of fair comeliness") that makes Tsvetaeva sound disconcertingly like some forgotten lady follower of AE Houseman. A couplet rendered "My desire is for something higher / The camp sky that is above all - flame-coloured!" reads like an unintentional manifesto for the poetics of translation adopted at some points.

Still, it is unfair to maul Kemball too badly. His renderings at least sound like poetry of a kind, though maybe not a very fashionable kind. The plain prose broken up by line divisions used by some of McKane's translators acts as a barrier of another sort, a concrete rather than brocade curtain perhaps. When Tarkovsky's tribute to the joy of metrics comes out as "How strange to reflect that our barter has given / Us rhymes..." the original thought seems simply absurd. Even if prejudiced against rhymes, a translator needs to opt for "barter" at some level, replacing them by other kinds of formal patterning such as assonance and the counter-intuitive line-break.

Fortunately, exactly this sort of transaction has taken place in Michael Molnar's renderings of Krivulin, where parallelism and syntactic dynamism carry the poetic cargo forward: "when the poet bespecked with eyes / but all bespectacled, in the lenses' rollcall / catches a distorted silence / and the nexus where light-weaves intersected // when sliding down a fiery sinusoid / he strives to gain a foothold and to freeze / petrified before the biblical cloud / in which the Voice's being begins / then what's the point of verse?" The question is of course answered before it begins; and just so, if anyone had ever wondered what the point of translation is, occasional versions in this book may put an end to their scepticism.